Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Writer and the Fatwa

(First published in The Pioneer, Agenda section, on October 7, 2012)

RAJESH SINGH

February 14, 1989, was Valentine’s Day, just as February 14 every year
is. For Salman Rushdie it held little significance, as nothing was going
right for him on the personal front. Relations with his wife were
strained and the celebrated author was struggling with the emotional
fallout of a separation that was still to be formalised. But his
professional life could not have been more cheerful. Only five months
ago, the British edition of his latest novel had been published, and the
American edition was scheduled by the year-end.

Following the booming
success of Midnight’s Children released eight years ago, he had
become the toast of the literary world, rubbing shoulders with
legendary writers, powerful politicians and glamorous celebrities from
the entertainment industry. For a writer only in his early 40s then, the
fame could be intoxicating. If it was, then Rushdie was soon to be
grounded, in fact under-grounded, and purged of that exhilarating
belief.
On that day in February, he received an unusual response to his new
book which had arrived in the British market five months ago. The
message was from Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini; the
book was The Satanic Verses. The then Grand Ayatollah had issued a fatwa
— an edict — addressed to Muslims worldwide. It read: “I inform the
proud Muslim people of the world that the author of the ‘Satanic Verses’
book, which is against Islam, the Prophet and the Quran, and all those
involved in its publication… are sentenced to death. I ask all the
Muslims to execute them wherever they find them.” Five months after the
book had hit the stands, the religious leader had woken up to the
realisation that it had blasphemed Islam to such an extent that nothing
less than death to the author would wipe off the desecration.

Noted Islamic scholar Maulana Wahiduddin Khan has in an article
published recently in an English language daily emphatically said that
the Quran does not provide for any punishment to people who abuse
Prophet Mohammed. If he had suggested that to Khomeini in 1989, he would
probably have found himself sharing Rushdie’s fate. The Ayatollah had
no hesitation in sentencing one Muslim (albeit a somewhat non-believing
one) to death; the addition of another of the faith was no big problem
for the bearded mullah.
What happens when an author becomes the target of not just one
individual, not just one radical outfit, but of anyone and everyone
residing in any part of the world that would be even half-willing to
execute the fatwa? Whom do you protect yourself from? And how do you do
it? Also, what happens to the freedom of speech in a free world
inhabited by free people and even freer writers? Where have all those
voices and those eager faces that are heard and seen so often in support
of free speech, gone? Joseph Anton takes us into that world where some
of those answers reside. Joseph Anton is what Rushdie took on as his new
name after he went into hiding following the Ayatollah’s edict. Joseph
Anton is how he lived the many years since 1989 until he resurfaced
after the crisis more or less blew over, in the name that his parents
had so lovingly given him. Joseph Anton is Rushdie’s memoir written in
the third person; the account of an Inquisition held of a person in
absentia, an accused who remains underground throughout the process like
a scared rabbit, emerging tentatively but only briefly to maintain a
link with the real world.

If he had to be recognised and discovered in those momentous years
following the fatwa, he would have been burnt at the stakes; in his
absence a bonfire of his blasphemous book did the honours. Had he indeed
written something so terrible? Whatever, in the memoir, Rushdie quotes
Heinrich Heine, “Where they burn books they will in the end burn people
too.” This was a starkly real comment to come from the German Romantic
poet and essayist of substance.

But isn’t it all about creative freedom so long as the purpose is not
mala fide? Try telling that to the Islamists (or any hardliner with a
different terminology). Rushdie as Joseph Anton contemplates: “To be
free one had to make the presumption of freedom. And a further
presumption that one’s work would be treated as having been created with
integrity. He had always written presuming that... it would at the very
least be treated as serious work...” Well, it wasn’t, not in many parts
of the world — and not in India. This last bit hurt him the most for
two reasons. One was the fact that he belonged to India, though he took a
British citizenship subsequently; and two, he never imagined that a
country which valued free speech so greatly would ban his book — ban it
even before the rest of the world woke up to the ‘evil’ written in it.
In Pakistan, where his parents shifted after living much of their lives
in Mumbai, he had no hope, and so he never felt betrayed by that
country. Rushdie writes in Joseph Anton, “Pakistan was the great mistake
of his parents, the blunder that had deprived him of his home. It was
easy to see Pakistan itself as a historical blunder too, a country
sufficiently unimagined.”

So, India broke his heart, because until the ban, the “presumption of
intellectual freedom and respect had been ever present (in the country)
except during the dictatorial years of ‘Emergency rule’ imposed by
Indira Gandhi...” Disheartened and a loss to understand how to
retaliate, he penned an open letter to then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi:
“What sort of India do you wish to govern? Is it to be an open or a
repressive society?” But that ‘secularist’ Prime Minister had earlier
rendered null and void through an amendment to the Constitution a
Supreme Court verdict giving maintenance to a Muslim woman who was
abandoned by her husband. When the Islamic clerics kicked up a row and
claimed that the judgement interfered with the shari’ah, Rajiv Gandhi
moved quickly to pacify them and negate the apex court’s ruling. How
could Rushdie have expected better from that Prime Minister?

Things have got no better since then. One supposes that if a breach in
the freedom of speech is not amended strongly enough, it can serve as a
precedent for several more to happen. The banning of The Satanic Verses
provided a perfect setting for what was to happen in later years. More
books were proscribed; foreign authors were barred from entry or from
extending their visas; supposedly offensive paintings were vandalised,
painters abused and forced to leave the country; cartoonists were
threatened and jailed. Rushdie has all but lost hope in India as an idea
of a free and tolerant society.
Chained and bound by the fatwa, the author finds an interesting mode to
depict his state. The bird, which symbolises freedom, becomes for him
in Joseph Anton his metaphor for a juicy target — a sitting duck, so to
say, and the duck is a bird, right? Before the storm broke out in the
full, Rushdie was vacationing in Mauritius and looking at the birds that
flew past the clouds and over the waters. “He should have paid
attention to the birds. The dead flightless birds who had been unable to
soar away from their predators, who tore them apart... In all 24 of the
island’s 45 bird species were driven into extinction,” he comments.

How sad. And now he, like those unfortunate birds, would be the next.
“A mullah with a long arm was reaching out across the world to squeeze
the life out of him.” And, many years later, in 2001, as the Twin Towers
collapsed, “birds were screaming in the sky”. And, in many parts of the
world, egged on by religious zealots and consumed by blind hatred for
something they neither understood nor wanted to understand, mobs of
thousands had taken to the streets in the 1990s and beyond and chanted,
“Rushdie, you are dead.” Well, he was in a sense, and out of him was
born Joseph Anton.
For all its grim setting, Joseph Anton is not lamentation all the way,
nor is it an attempt by the author to project a heroic image of himself
during the years of crisis. That would in turn have taken a heroic
effort to do — considering the deep fear that had gripped him in those
years. It was the fear of not just personal harm but also harm to his
son and all those he cared for as family and friend. In fact, the memoir
is really a revisit to a nightmare. Yet, there are ample traces of wit
in the narration which must be credited to the author’s sense of humour.

Finally, Rushdie confirms to us that minority appeasement by
politicians is the same all over the world. He offers a number of
instances of that in Great Britain, with so-called leaders falling head
over heels to placate the hardliners over the book and condemn The
Satanic Verses. One of the Muslim community leaders who spewed venom on
him and his writing and inflamed passions was later honoured by the
British Government. The poison had spread wide, with several literary
giants, after the fatwa, playing safe and suddenly discovering that
Rushdie had perhaps overdone the ‘freedom’ bit.
Through this memoir, Rushdie may have hoped to purge himself of the
horrors of those days. Maybe to an extent he has managed that, but he
has still left behind several uncomfortable questions. Damn these
writers, they will not allow us a moment of peace.

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About Me

Born in Allahabad district of Uttar Pradesh.
Brought up in Coimbatore, Cochin and Goa.
Lived in Goa for 36 years: from 1968-2004.
Worked in various positions at the Goa-based English dailies: The Navhind Times and OHerald.
Was Editor of a Goa-based TV news channel Goa 365.
Served as Media Advisor to the Goa Chief in 2002-03.
Served as Director of Information and Publicity, Government of Goa (2002-03).
Now, based in Delhi and working for The Pioneer as Senior Editor